Today's Special: Stone Soup

As indicated by the title of this posting, today's special is Stone Soup, which means that I will be commenting on more than one topic. But first thing's first. Dora and I attended our niece's (Alex) choir concert last night and, as usual, it was awesome. And Alex looked very pretty in her attire.
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TRIBUTE TO A GENUINE LEGEND: JOHN LENNON, 1940-1980. THE ANNIVERSARY OF HIS UNTIMELY DEATH WAS DECEMBER 8th. THIS WORLD NEEDS MORE PEOPLE LIKE JOHN. "IMAGINE" HOW MUCH BETTER THE WORLD WOULD BE!!!!! RIP
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Well, Obama has decided to send more troops to Afghanistan. Tsk, tsk, tsk. I don't like this decision. Frankly, I'm disappointed in Obama for beating the war drums like this. After all, at a cost of more than $100 billion a year, the U.S. cannot afford a war that does not make us safer. Though Obama blasts the notion that the war in Afghanistan does not compare to the Vietnam War, I think there are good arguments that it does. For instance, LBJ also hesitated about committing troops to Vietnam. He still did it, placing him in the middle of the quicksand. Then, as now, the war caused innocent civilian deaths--deaths the top brass prefers to call "collateral damage." Obama claims that our troops will be training Afghan soldiers. Hmmm, LBJ promised that "Asian boys" would do the fighting. To LBJ's credit, they did. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of young American soldiers died along with millions of Vietnamese. If you are unsure about the war in Afghanistan, then I encourage you to not support it. There is an interesting website I highly recommend for your perusal: www.rethinkafghanistan.com
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Thanksgiving has come and gone and now we are waiting for the bowl games (and Xmas,too). Incidentally, only Texas Tech and Oklahoma are favored among the eight teams that were selected. GO TECH!!!!! The Horns of Austin are the underdogs against Alabama in the BCS Championship Game. In fact, 73% of SportsNation indicated that Texas would lose. I agree. After watching the performance (or lack of one) by Colt McCoy & Co. against the Nebraska Cornhuskers, UT does not deserve to be in contention for the national title. Furthermore, McCoy should kiss his chances of winning the Heisman good-bye, au revoir, and adios. His performance (or lack of one) was absolutely NOT Heisman-caliber. I'm not a BAMA fan, but I predict BAMA wins by three touchdowns and a field goal. Good luck Horns. You will need it. What is the silver lining to this BCS fiasco? The Florida Gators will not be playing in the championship game!
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I was reading The New York Times and found two articles which disturbed me. The subject of the first article was the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, which was ordered to release more than 12,000 pages of documents relating to lawsuits alleging decades of sexual abuse of children by its priests. Allow me to reiterate the word "ordered." According to the report, "it was not the power of repentance or compassion that compelled the" diocese to release the docs, but "it was a court order...The diocese had spent seven years fighting a lawsuit brought by The New York Times and three other newspapers to unseal the records in 23 lawsuits involving accusations against seven priests." Of course, this information does not revise our knowledge about the scandal that has plagued the church since 2002, when the scandal erupted in Boston. But the testimony provided in these documents is still chilling. And the problem does not exist only in the States. It is also found in Ireland. According to The Times, the church and the police in Ireland covered up decades of child sex abuse by priests in Dublin. The cover-ups continued to the mid-1990s and beyond! The report was prepared by a group appointed by the Irish government and called the Commission of Investigation Into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin, and indicated that the church was concerned only with "the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets." And the accounts of abuse are as chilling as the accounts in the U.S. One priest admitted to abusing more than 100children! It is NOT my intention to only pick on the Catholic Church. Scandal, corruption, greed, and hypocrisy can be found everywhere. These articles simply crossed my daily reading of The New York Times. I also find it coincidental that these articles came before my eyes at a time when I have just learned (last month) that a close friend of mine admitted being sexually abused by a priest. In the past, when I read about the abuse, it made me sick to my stomach. But now that the abuse hits closer to home, my feelings have evolved to consummate anger.